Dickieville
... May 2006

Tasha continues to drive much of our day to
day schedule, demanding as all puppies are. But she continues
to be soft and cute enough to get away with it. One of her
favorite games now is “attack Dave’s slipper.” Every morning
when I come down, I immediately get a small furry creature
attached to my foot that I have to drag around the kitchen while
I get coffee and breakfast. Patric has acclimated to Tasha
rather well, and enjoys playing with her and reminding her that
he’s the lead dog in the house.

Tasha gives new meaning to "fuzzy slippers"

Of course, it wouldn't be fun if we didn't have a Cardinal family
nesting in the bushes outside our front door, making it impossible to
take Tasha out in the three and a half seconds of warning she provides
before she piddles on the floor. Actually, I'm kidding... Tasha
isn't quite house broken but she's doing pretty well, and we decided the
birds had to live with our needs. The nest was right outside one
of our windows, and we peeked regularly to see how the three babies were
doing. One died, but the other two went from the ugliest little
critters you've ever seen, all nasty naked necks and gaping mouths
looking for food from mommy to adorable young birds capable of flight in
three days. It was pretty amazing. The shots below are a
little fuzzy because the window confused the camera's distance settings,
but you have the mom, the dad, and the chicks.

Brie is continuing to play on the Acton Boxbourgh High School Tennis
team (pictured below... you can spot Brie because she's the only one
looking cool in shades). They just recently won their 8th match,
qualifying them for the State tournament. I'd say their names but
a) that's a lot of names and b) I don't know all of them. Brie has
decided that we have to get matching doggie-vests for Patric and Tasha
that have a tennis ball and "AB" on the back. Apparently the
tennis team will have corgi mascots despite the team name being
"Colonials." Obviously, she's just looking for an excuse to dress
the dogs up.

In the meantime Will has a new, dark obsession
called “Airsoft.” The BB guns of my youth with the little metal
BBs
have been replaced with high tech, amazing realistic weapons that fire
plastic or ceramic BBs. These, in theory, may sting but can’t actually
break skin. Will has a Smith and Wesson pistol, a fully automatic
AK-47, a fully automatic M-16, and a sniper rifle with a scope. The
automatic weapons are electric. The AK-47 is actually pretty amazing
and fires an accurate stream of bbs at 300 or so FPS. It also cost
about as much as a real gun. Will occasionally joins with other
neighborhood kids to have a shooting war, wearing scary looking masks to
protect their eyes. I long for the good old days when you could pump up
your Crossman 760 powermaster enough to put a metal bb through a coffee
can. That’s when shooting wars really count.

And while Will is figuring out out to
annihilate everything in the neighborhood, Brie and Kate are
using the (finally) nice weather to spruce up the yard and plant
a herb garden (the marigolds are there to keep the deer and
rabbits away).

2006 first
launch

Out of the five rockets we currently owned,
the small yellow flea was still out of commission with a broken
fin and the white pre-built Aries (Still missing the payload
section from a bad launch last year) needed a parachute. That
left the black Intruder, which we had launched a couple of times
last October, and our two virgins, the blue three-finned
Triskilian, which I had finished in the early winter, and the
big, bad, mid-power "Phoenix" AIM-54C. The AIM-54C, the most complicated
rocket I’ve built to date, was about ten hours into
construction, in theory needing only some detail painting of
bands and rivets to make it look like its real world
counterpart. As it stood, it was a uniform glossy white and, in
my opinion, looked pretty good, which lead to the following
conversation:

Kate: “It looks like a marshmallow.”

Dave: “It’s got a giant point at one end.”

Kate: “OK, it looks like a marshmallow on
a stick.”

Dave: “It’s over two feet tall.”

Kate: “OK, it looks like a stack of
marshmallows on a stick.”

Dave: “Great.”

From left to right: The AIM 54C, the Triskilian, The
Intruder, the Aries, and the Flea

The Trisk was
the first launch, and while I was getting the “A” engine, Will pulled
out the parachute to add the flame-retarding wadding, unaware that I had
prepped all the rockets before we left. I jammed the parachute back in…
which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. The launch went fine, but at
apogee, the parachute charge blew the engine compartment apart instead
of expelling the parachute. The Trisk came down like an arrow and
embedded itself in the ground with the remaining bits of its fins
littered around it.

Death of a Triskilian....

Launch!

Going...

Going....

Gone... boom, that is!

Watch your head!

The aftermath is not pretty.

Launch number
two was the AIM. This was the first launch we’d ever done on a “D”
mid-power engine, which was much larger than the standard A/B/C engines
and, like the C, was packed to the top with gunpowder. It didn’t
disappoint… the launch was spectacular, much more impressive than its
smaller cousins. Better yet, the AIM was large and heavy enough that it
only went two or three hundred feet into the air, low enough that
drifting into the trees wasn’t a problem. The parachute deployment went
well, except the line to the nosecone snapped, more of a problem with
the AIM because the nose cone is actually made out of paper stiffened
with CA glue instead of balsa wood. It survived the free fall
perfectly, however, and the rest of the rocket came down on the Mylar
parachute without incident. I tied off the nosecone a little more
securely and we did two more launches on the AIM, all of which were
picture-perfect.

The Intruder launch went well, along with
the parachute deployment, but the plastic chute had been wrapped
up for two long and didn’t fully open. The Intruder didn’t hit
too hard, but the two side fins are a little fragile and were
attached with standard white glue, since I’d built it before I
switched to using the much stronger CA glue. They broke off,
effectively sidelining the rocket until I can repair it.

That left us with the final launch of the
day, which I approached with some trepidation. I’d gone ahead
and purchased one Aerotech “blue thunder” composite fuel
engine for the AIM. At $12 a pop, they are expensive, but the
composite fuel (the kind used in some military rockets) is much
more powerful than standard gunpowder; in fact, about three
times more powerful. The trepidation came from the assumption
that the AIM would, therefore, go two to three times higher and
that we might lose it in the trees. And, long story short, that
is exactly what happened. I wish I could say the launch was
impressive, but “scary” would have been a better description.
Snapping pictures of the AIM on the “D” engines at launch caught
it a few inches off the ground. With the Aerotech the rocket
was gone by the time I could snap the shot, and the liftoff was
so violent it ripped the guide tubes off the side of the
rocket. The sound was loud enough that Will literally fell
over.

At the end of the day, the count was three
for three. Three rockets launched, three rockets lost,
destroyed or “blowed up.”

I think
I’ll stick with standard “D” engines from now on… or maybe “E”
engines, but that’s definitely it. In the meantime, I’ve
purchased another AIM-54C and a "Hawk" MIM-23A from the same maker (The
Launch Pad). Where the AIM stands a proud 27 inches tall, the
Hawk weights in at 37 inches. It should be pretty impressive.